Aya M. Productions

Sweet Home by Tillie Cole is a romance about a girl with no family and a boy from terrible parents that somehow find a home in each other.

Molly Juliet Shakespeare is a 20-year-old master’s student from England visiting the US assisting her advisor in research. She meets Romeo “The Bullet” Prince, the star senior quarterback, as the TA of a philosophy course. So at first, I thought it was simply going to be a stereotypical cliché. The nerd gets the star athlete type plot. Partly it is, but Tillie Cole was able to add depth by bringing in Rome’s family life into the picture. His parents are terrible, are dead set on him marrying the girl they’ve chosen, and simply just hate him for reasons I even couldn’t have guessed. So like their namesakes, they had to fight against the odds in order to be together.

I enjoyed watching Molly and Rome at first try to avoid being intimate with each other and eventually opening up to each other. They grew as characters as their romance grew, Rome in particular. One thing that was a bit odd for me was how they were physically intimate with each other. I guess Rome needing to have control over sex/Molly giving up control makes sense especially since it was explained why they needed it in the dialogue post physical intimacy, but I didn’t think it was necessary. It made their romance not as sweet, which is what I thought it was originally. Basically it didn’t work for me, and luckily I can easily gloss over those scenes, moving on to whatever was next in the story.

The one thing I didn’t like about the story was how Molly handled the situation during the climax. By doing what she did, showed that she didn’t grow much as a character. She simply reverted back to her old self again. I don’t understand how she could have done that. Granted it did set the plot up so that she could make amends for the wrong she did before the story started, and she did eventually do what she should have originally done. Overall though it was that one scene that kind of brought the story down a bit for me and is why I think Rome grew as a character more than Molly did.

All in all, Sweet Home was a great story, and I’d give it 4 stars. I enjoyed reading it, and I read it in one evening. There were things that I didn’t like, but it wasn’t that big of a deal as far as affecting my reading experience. I am excited for the release ofSweet Rome in 2014, which is Rome’s POV. He was my favorite character in this story. So it’d be interesting to read his POV.